Posted
by
Hemos
on Monday September 26, 2005 @09:00AM
from the does-size-matter dept.

SteveK writes "Hexus has been testing some 34 PC power supplies to see which is best. There are some interesting results. An Enermax 535 Watt PSU couldn't deliver much over 450W, while a cheap 250W PSU did exactly what it said on the box. There's also a video of a (very cheap) 650W PSU under 400W of load, requiring over 1kW of input power to sustain the load, before blowing up."

Mod me down for slander, but I don't understand why we keep linking to Hexus reviews. Their content quality is high but their servers can't take a slashdotting for more than 3-4 minutes. 0 comments and it's taken over a minute to load as it is:(.

We've got new kit going into place soon, but that's not my department. We've taken measures in the meantime to cope with any traffic surges, like Slashdottings, but with a massive article like this one, it's tricky.

Why doesn't the submitter just post the Coral Cache link straight off? Then we wouldn't have this problem. Or am I being dense? Surely there's no point pushing a server over if it's obvious to all that it will not survive the slashdotting.

I assume you guys are server-limited, not bandwidth-limited, when the Slashdot beast comes around. So why don't you put up a static version of the page when the Slashdotting hits? Why don't you at least use some sort of caching to reduce the load on your servers? Is there something obvious that I, not being a mighty server admin, am missing?

Tell me.. Why does Hexus, and so many other sites, divide the articles into so many small pages?

This review is 26 pages! That's at least 26 pageviews to read the whole thing for each user. Multiply that by slash dot and... Well, let's just say the server is KO'ed.

Instead, why not have several reviews on each page? Just doubling the size of each page halves the number of page loads needed for each user. This applies for news sites and such too. I don't get why they split the articles into three or four pages, when you could easily have one big page to scroll through. Less pages also means readers will be less annoyed having to click and wait for the next page when the server is bogged down.

Funnily enough, this actually encourages the Average User (a mythical beast, only whose footprints have ever been found) to read the whole article. Usability reports I remember reading a few months ago indicated that on an interactive medium like the web, users get "bored" if they don't have to interact with a page for too long. If you don't provide regular user-interaction (eg, by making them click for the next page) they get fractious and are more likely to drop out of reading the article.

I've actually noticed this myself a bit - if I've got a long page (> 5 screens) to read I'll often find myself double-clicking on words/lines in the text or highlighting them with the mouse. I don't really even realise I'm doing it, but when an article's split into several shorter pages (although it annoys me slightly having to click "Next" all the time) I don't find myself doing this.

I usually read like this, selecting what I am reading or about to read, on the web or any other texts on the computer. It helps me to find, vewry quickly where I am in the text in the event that something distracts me while reading.

Funnily enough, this actually encourages the Average User (a mythical beast, only whose footprints have ever been found) to read the whole article. Usability reports I remember reading a few months ago indicated that on an interactive medium like the web, users get "bored" if they don't have to interact with a page for too long.

And clicking on the "next" button is somehow more interactive than clicking on the scroll bar?

They won my heart when my box killed a vantec stealth after 2 months and a Antec True Blue after 3. I got the 510 delux and havn't had any problems sense.

Infact, 2 months after I bought it, one friday night around 8 pm I got a call from them. They had a run of bad caps and my serial number was one that might have been in that run, so they are sending me a brand new one. It arrived that saturday morning around noon, same day weekend shippi

Funnily enough, this actually encourages the Average User (a mythical beast, only whose footprints have ever been found) to read the whole article. Usability reports I remember reading a few months ago indicated that on an interactive medium like the web, users get "bored" if they don't have to interact with a page for too long. If you don't provide regular user-interaction (eg, by making them click for the next page) they get fractious and are more likely to drop out of reading the article.

Well, 350W has been good enough for me for the past 2 years, but the next generation of video cards are actually demanding 400W and 450W power supplies (with auxiliary 4 pin molex power connections). And I'm not talking bleeding-edge graphics cards either. I'm just talking a fairly new GeForce 6800 for $140. Manufacturers could be overstating things, but if functions on my cards start fizzling out because they aren't getting enough power... then what?

I haven't had problems with power supply noise for years...It's almost always dwarfed by the sound of the CPU fan. That's where the real bottleneck has been...if you don't want to go liquid or nitrogen, then you're stuck with a perpetual irritating hummmmmmm.And god help you if you have an intel processor...The fans on those damn things are like jet turbines. I hated installing the Socket A fans, but god, at least they were freakign quiet.

Nope - don't go for Antec if you live in the UK. I bought one of their 430W power supplies, and after eight months it died. Fine, I thought, it is under warranty. So went to the web-site and after a bit of mucking about I managed to get an RMA. Or thought I did. I actually had filled in a form to request a form to request an RMA. Pointless bureaucracy gone mad. Still I got the form. Or rather excel spreadsheet. So now I need a) a working computer (erm, guys, the power supply's gone) and a copy of excel (probably an other speadsheet would have done) to tell them who I was, what I'd bought and when I'd bought it. Oh - they also wanted a scanned copy of the receipt sent back to them too. I did have an electronic copy that could have sent them, but it was on the computer that was dead. (They did suggest I could take a digital photo of the invoice and send that instead, but this was getting too Alice-in-Wonderlandish for me.)

But all this was just slightly stupid and annoying. What was very stupid and immensely annoying was that I had to send the power supply to them at my own expense to a different country. The power supply originally cost about 50GBP - to post it to the Netherlands (for that is where their warehouse is) from the UK cheaply (but insured) would cost about 25GBP. And they would not send me a new one until they had the old one back and checked out. I would end up out about half the cost of the power supply, and be without one for possible a couple of weeks. Suddenly, paying a premium price for a quality product did not seem to be such a good idea when faced with a avaricious and slow customer service department based in an entirely different country.

So my advice is avoid Antec if you live in the UK - you effectively pay about half the cost of the power supply if you need warranty repairs/replacement.

The story does have a happy ending - I bought the supply thought Amazon originally, and so phoned them up. After a bit of reminding them of their duty under Sale of Goods act (basically a quality brand should last longer than eight months) they agreed to replace it. They dropped the ball on the first attempt, so I actually ended up with a better spec'ed supply. Still an Antec, so if it dies it hits the bin rather than muck about with any ludicrious postal demands.

The story does have a happy ending - I bought the supply thought Amazon originally, and so phoned them up. After a bit of reminding them of their duty under Sale of Goods act (basically a quality brand should last longer than eight months) they agreed to replace it.

That's what I thought in the first place; I'd be interested in finding out what the legal position was w.r.t. stuff like this, bearing in mind that the UK has had fairly good consumer protection for a long time, and it's now even stronger (w/

I prefer to think of warranties as a practical gauge of how much a manufacturer trusts its own workmanship, rather than something I will necessarily choose to exercise rights under.

If one of my 5-year Seagate hard drives fails, I'm probably not going to ship it back to them for "repair," or at least I'm going to eBay whatever refurb they send me -- but I know from experience not to trust drives with 1-year warranties, any more, and 5 years tells me that if it's not DOA or within the first 30 days, it'll probably last a while.

If my CRT dies, I'm not going to ship it out, especially not at my own expense, and definitely not when it's big enough that the shipping company might destroy it in transit. If I can, I'll take it to a "local authorized repair facility," and I would be a fool not to have looked to ensure there was one before buying the CRT. Again, though, if it's not DOA or dead in 30 days, the warranty tells me how long it will probably last.

On the other hand, sometimes it does pay to go premium and get a product that has free shipping and even pre-ship as part of the warranty coverage, if the price difference isn't too great. At the time I bought some memory from Mushkin, I was paying a premium, but they had a good rep, and hand picked their own chips and boards, etc. I expected to never have to use the warranty before I obsoleted the equipment, really. Several years later, though, the memory failed. They sent me new memory as soon as I told them of my Memtest86 results, letting me ship the defective memory back afterwards, so my downtime was minimized. Obviously, memory is easy to ship, but still, FedExing back and forth, on top of the cost of another vendor I might have gone with with a long warranty but no shipping, would have been more than the cost of what I paid for the premium brand. And if I had bought cheap memory, and it failed a couple years later, I'd have had to just buy new sticks all over, which certainly would have been more.

Oh, yes, I have an Antec True 430, also:) It's probably about 4 years old, now. I bought it because it had the best reviews and a good warranty. I live in the USA, too, so theoretically I could ship it back easily. I've since heard some people claim their cases have caught fire, etc., but I really think they had to have been misusing the equipment by overloading or not venting properly, or not paying attention to warning signs. In my case, pun intended, I've never had a problem. Maybe because it's an Antec tower case, too:) (the case came with a smaller PSU, originally, but I wanted more power)

I've had to RMA a failed Antec PSU, too, but I didn't find the process to be nearly so bad.I went to their website from a working PC, downloaded the RMA form, filled it out, and faxed it back to them. Got an RMA number from them same day. Shipped the dead PSU to them, got a new one back in a few weeks. In the meantime, I installed a spare PSU I happened to have on hand and got the down system back up within hours.

It's not Antec's responsibility to minimize your downtime with their RMA process -- it's the

I have done lots of RMAs before - both personal and business. The previous one, Netgear, for example, the process went1) Phone them up2) They issue the RMA and stick the new part in the post3) It arrives4) You use the box to send the broken one back (at my own expense) with the RMA on it.

That, or something close to it, is my expectation. I do not expect to wait a few weeks for an off-the-shelf part. I particularly do not expect to ship to an entirely different country. I wouldn't have minded as much if it w

If you want them to pay the postage on the RMA, then you're going to end up getting that rolled into the up-front retail cost of the item. So you'll end up paying for an RMA on EVERY item, whether you actually need to RMA it or not. If you only pay for the RMAs that you actually NEED, then you'll end up coming out of it on top in the long term. $30 for RMA shipping is STILL cheaper than $100 to buy a brand new replacement.

Best Buy wouldn't care. They just need a product to ship back to their distributor, who'll likely only look in the box to see that "yup, it's an Antec 430 PSU all right!"
Anyways, your problem was most likely with your drives. Running 6 drives puts quite a drain. Seeing as how a an Intel P4 system needs 350W-400W minimum, 430 just ain't enough to run 6 drives, a power hungry GPU and a water cooler. But even without the 6600GT, you were definitely pushing the limits of the PSU for sure.

The PSU market is looking a lot like the amplified speaker market... in the sense that the marked figured is either a non-standard measurement, completely off the mark or, sometimes, true. As all the PSU reviews I have ever seen showed, many if not most PSUs come short of their markings as far as sustained output is concerned... either that or they do not stay within specifications across the load range.

My Northwood-3G/HT has a 300W PSU... and the Antec Aria case (a thermodynamic and assembly nightmare) in which it is becomes warm enough with only one drive, I would not dare putting three HDDs and a high-end video card in there. Since the wall power is around 170W at full load (2xSETI + Half-Life 2), it seems like I am only about half-way. Drives are around 15W each on average (desktop HDDs idle at 7-8W, seeks go up to 20W) so having four more is only about 60W, leaving ~90W extra (on top of my Radeon 9600XT) for a high-end video card and other accessories. So, a true 300W PSU should be able to handle such a load - as long as you do not have a Prescott.

I suspect the main reason why nVidia and ATI recommend supersized PSUs is because the average supersized PSU is a piece of junk that can sustain only a fraction of its rating. If all PSUs were able to deliver 100% of their rated output and still meet specs, graphics card vendors would not have to recomend so outrageously supersized PSUs. But the reality is that most PSUs will prematurely produce magic smoke at substantially less than full-load and many major-brand PSUs will shutdown or blow up well before delivering full-load even if you disregard specs compliance.

From TFA:We were very careful to use retail power supplies for our testing, mindful of not falling into the trap of asking manufacturers for supplies only to have special units sent which stand up more than a retail unit would.

That is so frustrating... I've been using PC Power and Cooling supplies for years. I have always liked them a lot, and I've always wondered how they'd rate compared with other "good" supplies. But these sites NEVER rate them. I wonder why?

Quality usually goes hand in hand with price. The best ones are usually the most expensive (PC Power and Cooling). The cheap ones do stupid crap like toss 400 watts onto the 5 volt rail and then call it a 650 watt power supply, when it might crash when you put in that 7800 GTX. Cheap supplies also often are very inefficient, dissipating huge amounts of perfectly good elecricity as heat. There are some exceptions to the rule, but in general I've found that the better ones tend to cost more.

Quality usually goes hand in hand with price. The best ones are usually the most expensive (PC Power and Cooling)....

Not always, and not what I buy. ALOT of powersupplies these days are way overpriced. They focus more on inflated power ratings on the cover and bling like LED fans and chrome gratings (who is even going to see that, the fan usualy is in the back??). A better way to determine quality is weight comparison. The ones that work better generally weigh more as they actually use real components rather than single-chip regulators. The brands I have stuck with are Sparkle and HEC, two brands that are rebranded by several other companies after inflating the price for their company's logo or the bling they add to it. 3 HEC's to replace cheapo came-with-the-case PS's, and all three are still running strong, several years longer than the ones they replaced. Best part is, they dont cost that much. Most reviews that include them (no I didnt rtfa on this one) take note of it, and they usualy wind up near or at the top, depending on how the test was done.

I'd just like to add that HEC power supplies are also surprisingly quiet and generally very reasonably priced. Sparkle PSUs are loud SOBs, but the parent here is absolutely right: Sparkle and HEC units are generally so reliable that they verge on boring. Which is very good thing to say about power supplies.

Sparkle all the way...never tried a HEC but I'll take a Sparkle-user's word on what constitutes a good power supply. In all benchmarks I've seen, Sparkle gives what the nameplate claims, and sometimes more. Right now I have a 300W Sparkle supply running an Nforce4 motherboard, Athon 64 3200, two CD/DVD writers, two hard drives, and a Radeon x800 plus a tangle of USB devices. Should I be using a 400W or above supply? Probably, but the Sparkle is marching right along.

The only PSU that ever died on me was the most expensive one:Topower 420 [dansdata.com]. It was in my gaming PC to protect the expensive components. I turn that machine on once a week at best. And no, it wasn't the dust that killed it - it popped a cap and was completely dust free. I also have a no-name PSU that cost me $30 with the case that has been on since mid 2000 (Linux server) with no problems.

Where I work, our rule of thumb is that heavier power supplies are higher quality than lighter ones. While I'm sure this isn't going to be true in every single case, it makes a certain amount of sense. A manufacturer of cheap power supplies is going to try to put the least amount of material and labor into their units as possible. Quality PSU manufacturers tend to put in better components and beefier heatsinks. (Hence the fan(s) can spin slower, resulting in a quieter PSU as well.)

like all things in life, if you cut corners [price wise] you'll get burnt...

Though to be honest I've always gone with Antec cases [Sonata series for instance] and never once had a problem with the case or PSU [specially on things like dual-core AMD and Intel processors with multiple drives and PCI-X cards].

If you paid 30$ for your 400W supply and it doesn't work... don't act very surprised.

Round here the 'name' brand is Enermax (the cheapest brand is coolermaster, which have a habit of exploding a couple of months after you bought them, and sound like an aircraft taking off...). Never managed to get the enermax to perform as it says on the tin - I have a 550w enermax that can't drive a 6800GT for example. They consistently overrate their PSUs, cover them with gold paint and sell them as 'premium' when they're nothing of the sort.OTOH the 'no name' PSUs seem to perform much better.. they're

If you designed switchers, then you should know about ripple current.Take a cheap PSU then check the specs for their output filter capacitors. When I see a flyback PSU with 20A outputs and filter capacitors rated for less than 1A ripple, I am mostly surprised that they lasted that long given that flybacks have the worst ripple currents of all switchers. While forward converters have much lower ripple, their 20-30A outputs often use 1A-rated caps... at ~50% load, the ripple current would still be over 5A RMS

Why did the testing procedure involve powering the supplies from what looks like a serious piece of kit delivering bang on 230Vac/50Hz. Surely an important consideration in choosing a power supply is how well it copes with a dirtier mains input?

Well, I can't RTFA due to some other people trying to do so, but a good test setup usually includes a "clean" primary power supply for fairness as was already suggested and then some fun add-ons to simulate controlled SNAFUs like bursts, surges and very short interruptions of up to, say, 100ms.

INTERNAL power supplies? Bloody hell is this really what we've come down to. If its not external and capable of re-starting a dead body then its not a power supply.

Seriously though, its a wonder to me that each device continues to insist on its own PSU, if you are running 3 servers (surely a minimum for the slashdot crowd), then 2 external supplies (main/redundant) should be all you need with a lightweight re-route internally to get the power onto the rails. This should be more efficient than multiple seperate boxes as it can level the load more evenly, and being external it can be cooled seperately as required.

Always suprised me on these new pizza box servers that I can't buy a pizza box PSU or two and save space enough in the main box for an extra CPU or two.

Always suprised me on these new pizza box servers that I can't buy a pizza box PSU or two and save space enough in the main box for an extra CPU or two.

I think it's a basic issue of amperage and voltage drop?

You take the same wattage of power, coming in over 120v, and output it at various voltages under 12v, and your cables coming out end up being pretty large if you need to go 4+ feet. Cable size and weight varies with amps [powerstream.com], not with volts or watts, so for the same wattage, lowering the voltage makes

if you are running 3 servers (surely a minimum for the slashdot crowd), then 2 external supplies (main/redundant) should be all you need with a lightweight re-route internally to get the power onto the rails.

I've thought about this, and it has been discussed on the beowulf mailinglist. And, in fact, APC has products that do this, but the number of computers that have direct DC inputs are few and far between. Usually, they are "telco" grade computers.

In general, each voltage conversion introduces it's own losses so if you can do it all in one jump you tend to be better off from an efficiency standpoint. For standard PC power supplies, the manufacturing volume leads to an advantage in per unit cost that is very difficult to compete against using a different architecture.48 Volts DC is the obvious alternative standard because of the telecommunications infrastructure but the newer automobile DC standard which is lower is a possibility also.

Telephone systems do it right. Power supplies charge battery, 48VDC. Each unit has an efficient DC-DC converter from clean battery power down to their working voltages. No surges, no dropouts. If Bell had designed the first PC, it would be modular, run on 48V and have a cool black Bakelite case.

If Bell had designed the first PC, it would be modular, run on 48V and have a cool black Bakelite case.

Actually, it would have been hardwired in, you wouldn't have been allowed to use third-party equipment, and you'd have been charged a monthly fee for rental:) You're right, though, about using batteries in line. Even without all the other benefits, like conditioning, it's a built in UPS, if the battery set is large enough.:)

Heh, sorry to say this, but I've lost two PRI cards and a pair of smart jacks due to power transients because the CO switched from battery to generator and back agian. Idiots had the gall to bill us 500 bucks for the calls to come out and swap out the fried gear so that we could diagnose the PRI cards. Glad we went wholesale on our dialups for that area, let a bigger company deal with a bigger idiot of a telco.

Funny thing is they do make em like this..HP's Blade servers [hp.com] run on a 48v bus. The PSU's are in a seperatly racked case. You can power an entire rack full with 2 PSU cages.You can get up to 6 enclosures in a 42u rack for a total of up to 96 blades.

Each PSU cage holds 6 PSU's and has 2-220v feeds so you can power a full rack with 4 220v circuts. The PSU's just deliver 48 volts so you could drop them entirly and use whatever 48v PS you have (telco anyone??) When were evaluating them we gave some serous thoug

In some installations, a 400V DC bus is used for simpler, more efficient and more reliable power distribution. By centralizing line inputs, it is easier to do power factor corrections, power conditioning and since it is all DC, a battery bank directly across the DC bus can replace the UPS. Each (sub-)system afterwards has it own DC-DC converter.Why is power distribution done at high voltages? Simple: to reduce conduction losses in wires, semiconductors and other devices. Old systems were based on 5V until A

AFAIK, none of the coral servers talk/share cache, so for each different coral server (the whole DNAME "find a local server" bit) each needs to cache a copy of the content, so the server *does* need to be still up by that point.

ah the site is slashdotted. Anyone lucky enough to have got ther before it caught on fire could they answer this for me: did they test the Truepower 2 550? how did it go because I just put in a order for one no longer than 10 minutes ago.

Funny you should say that... On Friday I was helping a friend put together a cheap e-mail box for another friend. He'd ordered all the parts online and was using the PSU that came with the very cheap case. We plugged it in and then got a nasty surprise when we touched the metal. Luckily it wasn't pouring out every watt into the case. It was just enough to be mighty uncomfortable. I'm now a true believer in better power supplies. If the site ever comes back, I'll be reading it.

The computer wasn't properly grounded, I see.If you plug a computer into an ungrounded outlet or use one of those 2 pring cheaters, often the case will float up to around 60 volts (in the US, 120 volts if you have 240 power!) at 1-5 milliamps.

The reason for this is the power supply forms a capacitive voltage divider with the chassis ground in the center, it's part of the filtering.

I work in a computer repair shop. We use Dell 250W PSUs - they are reliable and do what they say on the box.

We had one guy buy a motherboard from us. He couldn`t get it to start up. We tested it, it was fine. He took it away, came back saying it was definately buggered because it wouldn`t even start with his mates £65 super 650W mega-PSU that makes the lights dim when you turn it on. We showed him it working with a £15 Dell, and he was sold. Tail firmly between legs that time.

Not on all of their PCs. Some, like the Dimension 4x00, 8x00 and Optiplex GX400, use real ATX power supplies. Most of their other models require a rather inexpensive adapter in order to run with a standard PSU.

No idea why Hexus didn't review any Seasonics, especially given their reputation in the SPCR community. Yes, some people just care about pure wattage and 12v rails, but Seasonics have accurate wattage, high 12v rails (my S12-380 has 25a on the 12v rails) and are nearly *silent*. Yet nobody seems to have heard about the company because relatively few mainstream sites review their PSUs. Go figure.

The Slashdot effect is in full force so I can't RTFA, but given the 1KW in / 400W out description, I would venture to guess that either someone didn't measure or account for power factor on the input current waveform, or the thing was significantly glowing prior to smoke-release. 40% efficiency at that power level - ahem - sucks mightily.

1) Noise - should be as silent as possible2) Reliable supply of power - amount of power isn't an issue because if I want low noise I'm not going to be running a processor that has a jet engine attached to it! 250W should be more than enough, but I'd prefer 150W systems or 80W systems in the long term.3) Life expectancy. I'd like 5 years at least.4) Ability of a single Power Supply to supply power to more than one system. Especially if it is a 450W+ beast. I imagine that this would go hand in hand with being

I had this out with a major case importer here in the UK whilst I was in charge of production for a box-shifter. The PSUs they were supplying us were supposedly 300W units, but the number of returns we got because of these units was unbelievable. Furthermore, the silly bastards had supplied these things with a label giving the output currents for the various voltages, which only supported my claims that these supplies fell woefully short of their claims.

Working with the simple VI=P formula for the DC side, our calculations put the output of these things at somewhere close to 125W maximum. Nowhere near 300W, yet the sales droid still insisted they were 300W PSUs even after explaining our findings. I then told her we were going to stress test a couple. We did so, and most failed catastrophicly at around 150W drawn from the 3.3, 5 and 12V rails in the ratio indicated by the labels, which I took to indicate the ratings for current on the labels was probably correct and their figure in watts was a fib. Given that they knew the current ratings (if you print something on a label, you can't subsequently deny any knowledge of it), I then contacted the supplier again.

Needless to say we got the lot replaced without question when I sent three blackened PSUs and my report back to the supplier, but let this be a lesson to you: PSUs and PC speakers share one thing in common: Their ratings in watts are pure mythology. I was tempted to say that the 300W they claimed was *input* rating, but a PF of.5 is a bit of a stretch of the imagination even for a non PF corrected PSU.

I'd like to express my appreciation to these guys for performing a much-needed analysis and publishing the results for all to see. It's about time someone called PSU manufacturers' bluffs and published testing results for multiple brands and models. They even made sure to test mostly retail models to prevent the possibility of manufacturers supplying souped-up units.Looks like the moral of the story is to look carefully to see whether the rating on the box is for peak or sustainable power output. I just had

But, if you do buy a 600 watt power supply that is 10% more efficient than the 300/400 watt power supply you're not necessarily going to use all 600 watts all the time. In fact, if you put the same load on the 600 that you were going to put on a replacement 300/400 watt supply, you'd come out ahead.

The thing is, typically PSUs are most efficient at something like 80% of their rated power. At lower power - and most PCs use less than 200W most of the time - their efficiency gets worse. All things being equal, a PSU rated for up to 350W uses less power to deliver 250W than a PSU rated for up to 600W. Of course, a modern 600W PSU might beat an old 350W PSU due to overall increases in efficiency; some modern PSUs get 80% efficiency and above under nearly any load, no PC PSU did this 5 or 10 years ago.

Back in the day when I worked in a Cisco shop/ISP I was flipping through a Cisco Router parts catalog. I came to "Power Supply Cord" under one of the sections -- it was $50!

I asked my boss what was so special about a Cisco power cord. He said, "Cisco sells it to you", and proceeded to show me how a Cisco power cord is exactly the same as a normal power cord but with a slightly heavier gauge (14AWG vs 16AWG) of wire. When I pointed out that I could buy a 50 foot long 14AWG extension cord for less then $25 he said, "Yeah, but not from Cisco."

Next to CPU's and motherboards...your PSU is a very essential and pivotal component of your computer. And with all the new changes in format (going from ATX to ATX 2.0, the increased power demands of dual cores/sli/crossfire) I think MORE needs to be written about PSU's. Many times instability, computer issues that are blamed on everything else come down to PSU's. There are so many things that most people still don't know and isn't enough information about on these websites. Like:
1) Exactly what kind of

Parent (ghostmaker) is exactly right. Despite 10 years of computer building experience, I spent a good part of last week diagnosing what went wrong with my 3.2Ghz P4 'baby' that I built a year ago. The intermittent startups, shutdowns, and freezes screamed "RAM problem!" but even after swapping out the RAM, the problem persisted. Not wanting to believe that it could be a CPU or Mobo related problem, I scoured the internet for symptoms of a faulty PSU, but there is surprisingly little information. Before

Your ignorance is showing. The PSU is the single most importatn piece of equipment you can by. You've got a spate of delicate electonics equipment that needs a steady and quality flow of well-regulated power to function properly.

The lack of Antec and PPC PSUs tested notwithstanding, I always welcome a critical and tech-sound look at these underappreciated workhorses.

It is, after all, "news for nerds". Perhaps you would be happier here (they have boobies sometimes):